Bio

Dr. Scott Olesen is a Lead Data Scientist in the CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics. The Center’s mission is deploy better data and better analytics to improve infectious disease outbreak response. He earned his PhD at MIT, where he studied environmental microbiology and the human microbiome, and completed postdoctoral training at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, where he focused on the epidemiology of antibiotic resistance. He served as Scientific Director for OpenBiome, the fecal microbiota transplantation bank, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when he shifted to epidemiology consulting work for state and federal government, the US Navy, the National Basketball Association, and, finally, Biobot Analytics, a wastewater epidemiology company.